The present invention relates generally to the creation and display of electronic documents, and more particularly to the creation and display of electronic documents that accurately depict hard copy documents.
Electronic documents are stored on computer-readable media (e.g., computer memory or disks) and typically contain content (e.g., text, graphics and image data) and formatting information (e.g., page size and margins). Electronic documents can be stored, retrieved, displayed, and exchanged by computer users. Electronic documents are created by authors and publishers who may desire that the documents be viewed with a particular appearance. The Acrobat™ family of products from Adobe Systems Incorporated, of San Jose, Calif., enables authors and publishers to create, modify, exchange, and view electronic documents in a platform-independent manner. Acrobat™ makes use of a document description language (DDL) called Portable Document Format™ (PDF) which describes a document in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system used to create it. A PDF document has one or more pages, each containing any combination of text, graphics, and images in a device and resolution-independent format.
Although electronic documents have advantages, including their ease of transmission, compact storage, and ability to be edited, hard copy documents, such as paper documents, continue to be used. In fact, many electronic documents are used only for the eventual production of hard copy documents. Although current desktop publishing programs provide users with the ability to create and modify the content of electronic documents easily, the final form of assembled hard copy documents, for example, as provided by a document assembler (e.g., a printing or copier shop), will often vary from the intended appearance.